


Broken Trust

by Josey (cestus), junko



Series: Shattered Souls [9]
Category: Bleach
Genre: Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-05
Updated: 2012-12-05
Packaged: 2017-11-20 09:22:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,736
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/583779
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cestus/pseuds/Josey, https://archiveofourown.org/users/junko/pseuds/junko
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Urahara discovers a clue that implies Zabimaru has had a separate agenda all along, but, now that Renji’s survival depends on her, where could she be?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Broken Trust

**Author's Note:**

> This is a canon divergence that takes place after the Aizen’s betrayal and before the Bount Arc.

Kisukue stared at it again: a long platinum-blonde hair caught in the screw fixing the chair's backrest in place. 

Zabimaru had been in here. 

As a spy? Impossible. A zanpakutō didn't operate separate from its wielder in that way and Kisuke would bet his life on Abarai not being a spy of any description. Then again, a zanpakutō didn't normally ask for its own gigai. Was this what she'd had in mind when she'd insisted on being separated? 

It still felt unlikely. To be honest, Kisuke had a hard time believing that Zabimaru, for all its wisdom and power, had the intelligence to make a good agent, especially one who hacked into computers. But she might not be working alone.

There were ways of being sure. He held a hand over the computer casing, searching through the maelstrom of reiatsu swirling up from below for a hint of anything else, any _one_ else. When he found it, it came with all the wrong answers.

"Mayuri," he murmured, followed more distinctly by, "Damn you for an interfering fool." Of course it had to be him. Who else would be able to create something that a zanpakutō could use to access Kisuke's encrypted files? Who else would even try?

Damage control. He had to think damage control. How much data had Zabimaru got her hands on? What had she done with it? Had she returned to Soul Society already? Was he too late?

Another explosion shook the floor. Kisuke tipped his head back and cursed, long and loud. He didn't have time for this! Any of it!

_The boy comes first. We need him,_ Benihime pointed out.

_Yes, yes, I'm not about to abandon him, but I can't-_

_The boy,_ she reiterated. _He is flagging, Kisuke. The hollow he fights is powerful and he is wary of arousing his own._

Kisuke paused, halfway through thinking up another excuse. Ichigo hadn't released his bankai? No, he would have felt it. And without his bankai, Abarai would take him apart.

"Shit!" 

Turning his back on the mess in his lab, he sprinted for the training grounds, already incanting the highest level non-lethal bakudō he could think of. At this point, if it did damage Abarai, he'd consider it justifiable. It served the fukutaichō right for having a zanpakutō which took orders from Kurotsuchi Mayuri.

#

Everything was broken. Even though Renji was standing somewhere that felt like a forgotten dream, he knew: _this isn’t right. This isn’t how it’s supposed to be._

He crouched, naked, on a rocky outcropping in the middle of a natural hot springs. The bleak grey stone of a high mountain peak rose all around. Snow was falling in large, picturesque flakes, disappearing, like magic, before touching the warm water. Only… the edges of the pool had begun to freeze, and earthquakes brought down sheets of rock that tumbled into the pool with violent splashes.

Storm clouds rumbled overhead, their deep grey shifting to an eerie blood red glow.

This world was falling apart. 

His world.

Even though he rarely ventured into his inner landscape, Renji recognized it now. He also knew without attempting to scale the cliffs that he was trapped. That was why he so rarely ventured here. It was a safe place, but it was also a hard one: a place where the thin air was hard to breathe and whose walls had been assembled stone by stone from those found in Inuzuri’s darkest, most brutal quarry. The rocks here were coloured with… shame, mostly, but there were bits of other pain: loss, grief, and even deep pink quartz veins of unrequited love.

Renji only ever retreated into this fortress when he was so injured or hurt that the only way to survive was to hide any trace of vulnerability behind granite and steel―to seal away the warmth of his vulnerable, open soul behind thick, impenetrable mountains.

Now everything was bone and stone, and the hot springs had begun to freeze. Soon crumbling rock would fill the water, and no trace of heat would be left. Only hardness and ice.

Maybe if he spent more time here he would have seen the warning signs. He’d been so cold, so… flinty. But, there was no time to play the blame game. Renji stood up and shouted, “I know you’re hiding here somewhere. Come out already!”

A face appeared at Renji’s summons, but it wasn’t exactly what he’d expected. A tiny, shivering, snow-dappled furry head peeked out from a high mountain crevasse. The baby macaque’s black eyes were wide with fear. 

“Oh gods, Zabi! Look at you,” Renji said, emotion catching in his throat. “You’re so tiny!”

Renji tried not to think what it meant that this part of him had shrunk so much and looked so frail and helpless. Instead, he stretched out his arms to try to coax the tiny monkey down. At first, Renji thought it was far, far too late--that the macaque no longer trusted him. It seemed to shake its tiny grey head and looked around nervously for another option. If the monkey bolted for its hidey-hole now, when the earth trembled and shook, Renji could lose it forever under a landslide… or worse.

“C’mon,” he pleaded, his hands straining. “You can make the jump; I’ll catch you.”

A shifting pile of rocks caused the monkey to let out a frightened squeal. It took a wild flying leap. Despite Renji’s promise, it slipped through his fingers, beyond his reach and into the water below. 

The macaque sank like a stone, disappearing beneath the dark waters.

“Shit!” Renji cursed as he dove down after it.

Only when he was deeply immersed in the dark, frigid water did Renji remember: he didn’t know how to swim. It’d never mattered before, because the hot spring was normally shallow. But, part of the new wrongness of this place was that there suddenly was no bottom… and the light was quickly disappearing above.

Renji swallowed the fear that clenched his stomach and… flailed. He had no idea how to move through the black water efficiently, but that didn’t mean he wouldn’t try--especially since he could see the baby snow monkey, just below him--just barely out of reach. It was curled tightly around itself, gripping its tail as if for dear life. Its shivering tiny body resembled little more than a gray ball, with soft, liquid brown eyes--eyes looking to Renji for protection and strength. 

The urge to protect the macaque pushed Renji forward, struggling to find purchase, but pouring every ounce of determination into each desperate stroke.

It was working. He was almost there. Renji’s hands grasped for the sinking fur ball, swiping and missing and trying again.

That’s when he realized the water was beginning to solidify. Ice formed chunks around his body, imprisoning him, and the cold sapped the strength from his limbs.

The monkey reached out a tiny wrinkled hand, just as the ice choked Renji’s throat, pushing the last of the burning air from his lungs. Renji watched, helpless, as the macaque sank into the blackness, the look in its steady, intelligent gaze was pure… disappointment and, worse… pity.

#

"Sajō sabaku!" The reishi chain shot towards Abarai, whipping round his neck like a noose and yanking him backwards, saving Ichigo from the cero that was about to hit him at point blank range. The cero shot into the air, exploding against the top of a nearby rock formation and sending half of it crumbling to the ground. The rest of the chain piled on to Abarai’s body in the same way as the first, loop after loop of it until nothing was visible from neck to knees.

Abarai threw his head back and screamed, a sound of pure rage. His mask was fully formed now, bone-white but for jagged black stripes edged with crimson. A mane of similar coloured hair spilled down his back and over his shoulders, only half-concealing the sharp spurs which protruded along his spine. Horns swept back along the sides of his head like a tiger's flattened ears, and in his mouth dagger-shaped fangs framed a snake's tongue that flicked out tasting the air. It wasn't just for show either, that tongue; Kisuke could testify to that. After using a concealment kidō in an attempt to get close enough to use Benihime again, he'd almost ended up impaled on Abarai's tail when that damned tongue had smelt him coming.

With a level sixty three restraint holding Abarai in place temporarily, Kisuke took the time to incant for the next one. Hands out in front of him with Benihime held level between them, he powered up the words, feeling the pull on his reiatsu as he spoke. "Carriage of thunder, bridge of the spinning wheel, light within darkness, tear apart this mortal realm and rent the heavens asunder. Hear my command! Come to my call! Divide this twice over! Level eighty, Jūnijōkōrō!" With a sharp crack, the chain split into twelve equal bars of light with solid reishi cores, two rows of six pinned Abarai around his chest and thighs, trapping and immobilising that damned tail. 

Blessed silence fell over the training grounds, the only sound the slithering patter of falling rocks as the after-effects of Abarai's latest escape settled across the landscape.

Kisuke pressed his hands to his knees and struggled to get his breath back. Even with his reiatsu, there was a limit to how long he could keep doing this. Even now he was having to use incantations for lower level bakudō that, earlier, he could have spun with a single finger and bit of intent.

"Will that hold him?"

Realising he'd lost his hat somewhere along the line, Kisuke fished around for it in the dust before glancing up at Ichigo. "It should for a while," he said, with more confidence than he actually felt, as he stood and replaced his hat carefully on his head. 

Ichigo was staring at the confined fukutaichō and he wasn't the only one. Sado had arrived about an hour ago along with Noba, the mod soul Kisuke had assigned to him, and the pair of them had been tag teaming Abarai with Ichigo while Kisuke did his best to lock him down again each time he got away. And it was a good thing too. That last escape had been nasty. Both the boys were bleeding and Noba was sitting with his head between his knees looking absolutely exhausted. He'd been teleporting both of them around to keep them out of reach.

The problem was not with Abarai's strength; though he'd probably be pleased to know that he was no push-over; it lay with the necessity of containing rather than destroying him. And they were rapidly reaching the point when Kisuke was going to be forced into doing the latter for fear of failing at the former. He couldn't afford for Abarai to get loose. They'd been lucky to get him down here in the first place. An arrancar level hollow on the rampage in a spirit rich town like Karakura was a recipe for disaster.

"If it comes to it," Ichigo was saying, "I'll take him down. I know he's a friend but I don't think he'd want to be out there killing people."

"It'll mean using your bankai," Kisuke pointed out, ignoring Benihime's hiss at the suggestion. She was increasingly concerned about Ichigo's inner hollow, and for good reason. Several times Kisuke had noticed the tell-tale blackening of Ichigo's eyes that spoke of his hanger-on getting feisty. 

Ichigo looked shifty. He didn't want to use it, that much was obvious, since despite the beating he was taking, he was adamantly refusing to release. That told Kisuke all he needed to know. Forcing the issue would be stupid, the risk too high. Two hollowfied captains would rewrite the definition of disaster in everyone's books.

He blinked tiredly and made his decision. This time he even had to incant to activate the two-way tenteikūra and Tessai's silence after Kisuke had described what was happening was telling. Finally Tessai said, "A second song bankin might just hold him. I'll come back and do it if you say."

Kisuke shook his head then, remembering Tessai couldn’t see him, replied verbally, "No. That didn't hold Ichigo and I think Abarai is actually stronger." He cast a wary glance over at the trussed up fukutaichō, who was already starting to move. It really was almost as though losing Zabimaru had freed Abarai's inner hollow rather than created it, which was an odd turnaround from Kisuke's experience with Ichigo. When Ichigo had hollowfied, although the hollow had been strong, it had been brittle. Abarai's was resilient to an extreme. "If there's no sign of Zabimaru, I'm going to have to call it."

"Whatever you say, boss. So far there's no sign of her anywhere, not even using bakudō. There's no trace of a senkaimon either. It's like she vanished."

That was good news couched in bad. If anyone could tell that a senkaimon had been opened, it'd be Tessai, so that meant Zabimaru hadn't gone back to Soul Society. But she was still gone, and that wasn't going to help Abarai. Damn, he was going to have to do it.

Kisuke sighed, guilt pooling hot in his belly. "Keep looking. We'll try and keep him locked down for as long as we can. Let me know the second you have something, anything, however vague."

They'd hardly had a chance to grab drinks and a breather before Abarai was loose again. Kisuke held off as long as he could, taking his turn at the front, beating Abarai back and knocking him down again and again. He even managed to pin him with one of Benihime's shibari again but the scream of pain he let out as the fire ate into him had Ichigo pleading for Kisuke to release him. Kisuke did and slammed another jūnijōkōrō on him, this one from a standing start, and that's when he made his decision. 

"Get back and stay back," he instructed the two boys. "This is going to destroy everything closer than three hundred yards. Noba go with them, if this backfires, transport them somewhere safe." The mod soul nodded and the three of them headed for the far end of the training area without argument. They might not like it, but surely they would see the necessity. Kisuke could only hope. 

A level ninety hadō might be overkill but it was the least he could do. Make it quick and clean. Abarai wouldn't suffer. 

He took a final look at the promising fukutaichō he'd effectively murdered and began the incantation. "Limit of the thousand hands, respectful hands...." Gods, but he didn't want to do this. "Shooting hands unable to reflect the blue sky..." Even when he'd tricked Ichigo into going after the hōgyoku for him, it hadn't been this bad. "The road that basks in light, the wind that ignited the embers..." At least then he'd had a higher purpose. What purpose was there in this? What purpose had there been? Research for the sake of it. How then was he any different from Mayuri? 

Abarai was struggling against the bakudō holding him, eyes wide and furious as he watched the spell taking shape. His tail tip lashed, a vague red glow beginning to form as he tried desperately to generate a cero to defend himself. 

Kisuke pushed on, "Light bullets, eight bodies, nine items, book of heaven..." Pinpoints of light formed around him, power boiling between them. As its focus and source, Kisuke felt the taste of it, the kick of it, lived it as it rode him into existence. "Great wheel, grey fortress tower. Aim far away, scatter brightly and cleanly when fired!" 

As the final word left his lips, something slammed into him from behind sending him stumbling to his knees. The hadō hiccuped, coughed and flew wide. It would still hit Abarai but not centrally, enough to maim but not destroy. Kisuke swore and was about to curse Ichigo up and down for interrupting him, because who else could it be, when a barrier slammed down over Abarai's location. 

As the taihō ricocheted off it to blow apart a far away mountainside, a familiar voice said, "Ya know, I'm not sure I like what you've done with the place."


End file.
